Engineering podcast series: Helping the world with humanitarian engineering

7 Oct 2020

Engineers are passionate about helping people and making the world a better place to live.

Our guests today, Vigya and Aira, are willing to go the extra mile to help the world through their passion working as humanitarian engineers.

Join us as we learn more about humanitarian engineering – an area where you can build on your existing engineering knowledge to solve problems and address global issues such as climate change and poverty or help to develop interventions for clean, modern and reliable forms of energy or water sanitation.

To learn more about studying engineering at UQ visit the Future Students website.

Duration: 21:26 mins

More information

Listen to more episodes in the series or subscribe to the podcast using Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcasting app.

Meet our guests

Aira Fabello

Aira Fabello is currently in her final year studying a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) at UQ, majoring in Electrical Engineering. Her journey with humanitarian engineering began during her first-year studies, when she took part in a project facilitated by Engineers Without Borders (EWB) which addressed agricultural issues in a disadvantaged community in Zambia. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she has continued to be involved with the UQ student chapter of EWB, where she enjoys running engineering workshops and educating future students about humanitarian engineering. She has also recently travelled to Nepal for two weeks to take part in the EWB Humanitarian Design Summit.

Connect with Aira on LinkedIn.

Vigya Sharma

Vigya is a Research Fellow with the Energy and Poverty Research Group (EPRG), and a Lecturer in Humanitarian Engineering at UQ’s Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology. She has an interdisciplinary background. Trained as an engineer, with a PhD in the Social Sciences, her work has mostly been at the intersection of society and the environment. Her past research has looked at natural disasters and climate change adaptation in mining communities both in Australia and overseas, energy access for development as well as barriers to decarbonisation in coal-dependent communities. When not watching Paddington on Netflix with her 7-year old, she enjoys cooking and reading autobiographies.

Connect with Vigya on LinkedIn.

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